you know how it goes

by ron androla, art by filipski. Rank Stranger Press

Book Review by Michael Basinski

There is by far too much poetry that fits an agenda. This agenda and that language and the Fifth or Sixth generatic of this or that New York School agenda and so forth and forth. No one is speaking. So how is it done, a poet to be, that is? Work third shift in a plastic factory, live in Erie Pennsylvania, and support yourself - that’s a way - but not because it is a pose and the cameras are clicking and you’re licking the gum out of the crevices of some rich kid’s Eastern coast college sneakers. That’s the first thing that comes to mind when someone says Ron Androla, poet - and when you read one of his books, like You Know How It Goes, it is an original home-made pie or pile of pancakes solo, only, high-flying voice, that can’t be concerned with anything but a pound of butter on the pancakes and words forming poems forming books forming decades of writing original, brain tickling, soul slicing, truth barfing, intellectual popsicle prodding poems. It is a cold wind America you feel pierces your sleepy eyes with one of his works like “An Amerikan Poem.” I was talking with a friend and he said, “Out of that whole group Androla is the best.” And I said, “I know.” An if there are outlaw poets, and there are, then there’s gotta be outlaw artists: Jeff Filipski did the graphic art for this book.